Moctesuma Esparza. UCLA, Unabashed.
Moctesuma Esparza, B.A. '71, M.F.A. '73, is CEO of Maya Cinemas and producer of such films as "Gods and Generals," "Selena," and "The Milagro Beanfield War." He serves on the board of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.
“When I came to UCLA in the spring of 1967, it was like most American universities then—very much the domain of a specific population that didn’t include people who looked like me.
“No surprise there. With maybe a million people of Mexican descent in the greater Los Angeles area, there were only a handful of American-born Mexican American students at UCLA.
"Chicano power” sounded angry and threatening. But it never meant power over others. It was about self-mastery, self-realization.
“Those were interesting times: student strikes, Black Power protests, anti-war demonstrations, police storming the campus and the entire university shut down more than once.
“Also on stage in that noisy theater: the Chicano Student Movement.
I had my eye on grad school in public affairs or history or government sciences.
Then an extraordinary film school professor—Eliseo Taylor—said, “You need to come back here.” And I said, “Why? I’m not a filmmaker. Hollywood has no place for me.” He said, “You don’t understand. You’re a producer. You organize people. You get people to do things. That’s what a producer does.”
“Our group managed to close a few administrative offices, pick up a few arrests and knocks on the head, but looking back we were surprisingly focused and—well—nerdy.
“We insisted that UCLA should be more inclusive; that it should proactively recruit qualified students who were underrepresented. I wrote a proposal, created an ethnic communications curriculum and presented it to the film school faculty and then to the chairman. There was a real resistance and discomfort. (Fair enough. We all had a lot at risk.) I was appointed to the department’s student/faculty senate, and we implemented the program.
The six years I spent at UCLA prepared me for the work I continue to do. I learned persuasion, the limits of social engagement, the processes required to build something or to change what needs to be changed.
“What I discovered was that the faculty and administration at UCLA could be persuaded that the institution needed to change. To its everlasting credit, it opened itself up to a transformative process, held itself accountable to those who saw it as needing transformation and allowed change to occur. Yet the fiber of the place survived that moment—transcended it. We came out on the other side in such a fashion that we can now talk about UCLA being a place of universal possibility.
“When I walk onto this campus today, I see a very different place than I saw 40 years ago.”
UCLA, Unabashed.
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